[Award Winner] Using the mosaic filter to make towns in Gimp

[torstan]

Now we'll put in some colour to finish the whole thing off. First of all, let's put in some grass background.

1. Create a new layer
2. Place it under your Colours layer and your Roads layer
3. Fill it with a nice grass texture (select a grass texture and then hit ctrl-.

Now it will look something like this - its starting to come together:



We also want roads that aren't black lines. For this take the following steps:
1. Create a new layer and call it Street Colour
2. Fill it with a nice street texture - I've found that the default Gimp pattern Slate is actually not too bad as a starting point.

Now this makes everything grey - we don't want that. We want to create a layer mask that will show only the areas we want.
3. Right click Street Colour in the layers dialogue and go to Add Layer Mask...
4. Select Black - full transparency in the Layer Mask Dialogue.
5. Select your Roads layer.
6. Select the Magic Wand tool and make sure the selection mode is Replace Current Selection
7. Click on the road to select all your roads (if you have disconnected road sections it is better to use the Select by Colour Tool here instead).

You should now have something that looks like this:



8. Select the layer mask for the Street Colour layer in the layers dialogue
9. Go to Select->Shrink and pick 2 pixels
10. Fill the selection with white.
11. Edit->Select none (ctrl-shift-a).

Now this gives a very hard edged road network. I personally think this is a little too clean. To fix this, still with the layer mask selected, do the following:
12. Go to Filters->Blur->Gaussian blur
13. Accept the defaults and hit okay.

You should now have something that looks like this:



Now the roads are a bit dark, so I used the Colours->Brightness/Contrast dialogue to up the brightness of the roads a bit: